Blacklist Every Last One of Them

Mari Uyehara on the Trump administration and why it's in the restaurant industry's best interest to protect its workers

This week, The Washington Posteditorial board made the remarkable decision to issue an op-ed scolding a 26-seat farm-to-table restaurant in rural Virginia for refusing service to a customer who made the staff uncomfortable. That restaurant, as most sentient political observers know by now, was the Red Hen in Lexington, VA and that customer was Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the Red Hen, politely asked Sanders to step out on the patio so that she could tell her discreetly that her presence upset the staff and then comped her group’s check. It was not a “leftist mob” as detractors claim, but an altogether civil ejection.

The editorial board made a simpering plea to “let the Trump team eat in peace,” warning about the degradation of norms and and the justification of “incivility” in a “special moment.” “How hard is it to imagine...people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?”

If this is the intellectual might and moral courage that stands between democracy and darkness, we’re fucking screwed.

Never mind that the anti-abortion movement has a long history of activism far more sinister, intrusive, and violent than quietly asking a customer to dine elsewhere. (If the WaPo editorial board would like to brush up on the fates of Dr. David Gunn, Dr. George Tiller, and so many others, The New York Times has a brief history on deadly attacks on abortion providers.) That aside, restaurant owners routinely deny service to obnoxious Yelpers, noisy children, and even critical restaurant reviewers—this is the norm. These are not protected classes, which include race, religion, disability, and gender, under anti-discrimination laws. Just as posting a “no shirts, no shoes, no service” sign is not equivalent to Jim Crow-era “white-only” policies—there is a wide chasm between bad behavior and immutable characteristics. The late celebrated food writer Josh Ozersky received a lifetime ban from the popular Momofuku restaurant group for blogging indiscreetly about information the owner, David Chang, considered off-the-record. There were no cries of incivility. Ozersky violated that restaurant’s particular code of ethics and was no longer welcome. C’est la vie.

Almost every reputable restaurant in America maintains a blacklist of customers too odious to be seated among polite company—and the entire Trump administration should be on every last one of them.

Blacklisting is not something restaurateurs take lightly. As Wilkinson explained in The Washington Post’s very own pages, the restaurant had maintained a politically neutral stance for a decade and she was concerned about the repercussions in the pro-Trump town. But her staff was so disturbed by the presence of Sanders—whose defense of the transgender ban in the military and family separation policy of immigrants took a deeply personal toll—that the chef called her on her day off. “I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” Wilkinson said. “I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.” To Wilkinson, what made the difference was that this was not a private citizen, but a public official, one who defended “an inhumane and unethical” administration’s vicious policies.

Wilkinson’s recognition of the costs of a principled stance were soon realized. Sanders used her official government Twitter account, instead of her personal one, to criticize the small private business—an ethics violation—and, later in a press conference, described the episode of being politely asked to leave the restaurant as “harm.” Trump jumped in, tweeting that the restaurant was “filthy” and claimed that he “always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!” Hordes of Trump followers targeted a different restaurant, Red Hen in DC, for days of harassment, including death threats and egging. The Washington establishment piled on the small restaurant and its seven-person staff, with an array of misguided commentary. In a now-deleted tweet, Politico’s Jake Sherman, last seen obsequiously defending the administration by decrying Michelle Wolf’s stand-up as “mean,” sided with the president, tweeting “kind of agree on the outside/inside dirtiness deal.” David Axelrod, CNN commentator and former Obama staffer, sarcastically noted: “Oh yes. Let’s get REALLY tough and deprive the Trumpies Chanterelle & Scape Risotto! That will change EVERYTHING!” Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush, snickered: "I guess we're heading into an America with Democrat-only restaurants, which will lead to Republican-only restaurants." None, mind you, peeped up when Vice President Joe Biden was turned away by a Virginia cookie shop in 2012.

But it was Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, who made the most revolting claim, commenting on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Sanders’s ejection “violates the spirit of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Hass believes that our press secretary’s suffering in not finishing her free cheese plate is on the same moral plane as black Americans, in the Jim Crow era, getting murdered, beaten and attacked by police dogs for seeking equal rights. More devoted to order than to justice, he makes for a fine modern embodiment of the white moderate described in Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.

What the condescending, confused political establishment misses is that the restaurant industry have a duty to its immigrant community, the same men and women who harvest our tomatoes, pack our meat, pick our crab, milk our cows, clear our tables, wash our dishes, and cook our food. According to the National Restaurant Association, 23 percent of all restaurant workers in America are foreign born; Pew pegs the number of undocumented immigrants at 11 percent. Immigrant labor produces 79 percent of the country’s dairy and 1.5–2 million immigrants work in the produce industry. Farmers across the country say that Americans don’t want these jobs, but we haven’t opened up legal immigration to meet the demands of our society. Immigrants feed us by doing the work we won’t. And increasingly, they’ve been targeted by the Trump administration with systematic terrorization tactics, upending their lives, safety and families.

The most emblematic of this cruel, new era was the Trump policy of separating 2,300 terrified migrant children from their parents at the border—one that experts say will leave the children with a lifetime of both emotional and physically manifested trauma. But it’s hardly singular. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has performed warrantless raids on upstate New York farms; they’ve raided meatpacking plants in Ohio and Tennessee; and border patrol agents set up checkpoints for undocumented immigrants on I-95 in Maine. Trump has claimed that he wants to get criminals, with MS-13 as his favored boogey man, out of the country. But the administration has focused on workers, ones that we desperately need, not criminals. The Maryland crab industry is in upheaval because they couldn’t secure the visas needed for the temporary workers that typically make up 40 percent of their workforce. Last year, the Trump administration killed a report showing that refugees add $63 billion to the U.S. economy, demanding that it only show costs not profits.

The Washington Post contended that “strong political feelings have spilled into what used to be considered the private sphere…we don’t think the spilling is a healthy development.” Yes, that is exactly the point: The Trump administration has targeted hard-working immigrants going about their daily lives in exceptionally and increasingly cruel and inhumane ways. The administration is turning away asylum seekers at the border to cut off their legal attempt at entry, then jailing them for the misdemeanor of illegally crossing the border, and scanning immigrants’ fingerprints in the attempt to strip them of citizenship. Meanwhile, it’s worth pointing out that Melania Trump worked in this country illegally and Jared Kushner committed a felony by omitting relevant information on his security clearance questionnaire.

This is not politics as usual. We’re not debating infrastructure or tax policy or environmental regulation; we’re talking about an administration that is attempting to enact, for all intents and purposes, ethnic cleansing.

While the political elite freaks out about their peers’ access to chanterelle-and-garlic-scape risotto, the restaurant community is coming together to protect the undocumented immigrant members of their family. In 2017, ICE agents dined at an Ann Arbor, MI restaurant and then detained three of its workers; another restaurant in the city refused them entry to the kitchen later in the year. At the Brooklyn Army base, a guard called ICE on a pizza deliveryman married to an American citizen with two daughters, putting him up for deportation; after which area restaurants started refusing to deliver to the base. When protestors jeered Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant, David Chang tweeted, “I wish we could’ve done this at our restaurant. That’s a fair warning.” Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio’s profile picture is him in an “Immigrants Feed America” shirt. And the Atlanta chef and restaurateur Hugh Acheson announced: "If you believe in taking kids from their families when the family is seeking asylum, I never want to have you in any of my businesses. I have to answer to god and my children in this life."

The Washington establishment tut-tutting restaurants and customers about letting Sanders, Nielsen, and Stephen Miller eat in peace want to enforce servility—not civility—of a non-white working class to powerful government officials, who are quite literally ripping immigrants from their families, harassing them at their place of work, and hunting them down on our highways and byways for the color of their skin. The David Axelrods of the world believe that immigrants and their sympathizers should be forced to cook for, serve, and clean up after their very own abusers in silence. Their outrage lies with protecting the comforts and ease of the powerful, while accepting that the vicious dehumanization of most vulnerable among us is somehow politics as usual.

It is quite strange to be living in an era in which a small previously unknown restaurant owner demonstrates more moral clarity and political bravery, whatever the consequences, than the editorial board of The Washington Post and Barack Obama’s old senior advisor. Now, more than ever, it’s important that we adhere to long-standing value of protecting the workers that keep restaurants running. If you can be ejected from a restaurant for writing a bad Yelp review, you can be banned from one for supporting this vile reign of racist terror. The Trump administration doesn’t believe that it has to submit to norms, whether it’s due process, financial disclosure, or keeping families together. Too bad. There is a norm in American restaurants that if you are too drunk, too obnoxious, or too abusive to restaurant staff, you don’t get served. It’s worth upholding.